


World of Ruin

by hyrkanianqueen



Series: Strange Clay [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Cross-Generational Friendship, Final Fantasy Inspired, Gen, Natural Disasters, Survival
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-24 15:49:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13216989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hyrkanianqueen/pseuds/hyrkanianqueen
Summary: A disaster has struck the earth, devastating a remote island where Rin, a young native girl, and Sano, a wealthy fish farmer, live. The two join together on a journey to find survivors or aid, but find they must build a new life as they go.





	1. Chapter 1

In the days before the disaster, before Sano came down from the mountain, he was a man of great wealth on the island—a farmer of fish. By marriage he held ownership over a wide network of ponds on the island, as well as certain parts of the surrounding sea. These were maintained by a tenured staff at precise depths, temperatures, and salinities to encourage the growth and hatching of fish. Each spring, the staff took Sano down the mountain by cart so he could supervise the transfer of the new hatches to a waterfront matched to them: warm shallows for sea bream, mangroves for shrimps, and his tuna habitat, far down on the lonely coast, where his bluefin grew fat protected by a natural eddy and fetched for him marvelous prices. The staff shipped the fish to the mainland; the staff maintained the boats and the traps; they kept his house and tended his wife. They were knowledgeable about the business and did their jobs well. It was one of the only jobs, in the modern sense, on the island. The rest was the property of ore men and forestry companies, who did not much desire workers, only land. This did not stop the small group of native islanders who did not work for Sano from keeping their own camp. They were not told the land had been leased, and most of the time, they chose on their own to keep out of the way.

Sano had never talked with an islander not under his employ. But the lifestyle he’d inherited was a carefree one, and it lent him a certain imperturbability when, coming down the mountain a month after the storm, he was confronted by the whalebone knife of the wary child Rin.

She shot up, startled, in the middle of the clearing, maybe nine or ten years old in a stunted frame, and menaced him dully, knife held flat, jaw set. She watched him with only one eye. The other was scarred and blistered shut. Her hair was roughly shorn around her face and darker than dark.  
Sano could see her heartbeat beneath the skin of her chest and averted his eyes out of modesty. His shyness made her lower her knife.

“Where do you live?” Sano asked. “Are you alone?” Hoping to hear here and no.

Rin assessed him a moment more in silence, then, mind made up, crab-stepped past him and returned to her foraging. Quickly and quiet, she cut a handful of thistles. She examined a fallen tree trunk and, from the hollow inside, excavated a mushroom. She held it close to her face and sniffed it, long enough for Sano to see it too, slime-capped and gray.

“Don’t—”

Into her mouth it disappeared in one bite.

Sano, who never got mad, who was teased by his wife and his staff for his absence of temper, felt a rush of fury. This careless child—no regard for the forests turning to swamp, no attention to the steady advance of rot, no respect for her own precarious health. No thought at all. She was a child, but even a child should have observed the situation. Even a child should understand the implications of finding herself left in this place alone. “Fool,” he spat.

At this, Rin stopped chewing and hunched over as if caught. She fixed her eye on the ground.

“You understand me,” said Sano, obligated now by embarrassment to close the distance. “You didn’t say anything, so I didn’t realize. I wouldn’t have said it. I’m nice,” he said, holding his hand out though it had nothing in it.

Rin obediently spat the half-chewed mushroom into his palm.

Sano overturned his hand, unsmiling, and the debris hit the dirt. “Be well, then,” he said. He wiped his hand on his trousers and continued down the path, leaving the girl behind.

There would be someone to look after her.

Somewhere on the island, there must be others who had not gotten out. Boats had left one after another from the shore, loaded double capacity; his staff had all evacuated. Before radio contact cut off, Sano had listened to the climbing death tolls from other islands, had heard the promises of aerial aid. But it had been thirty days, and the mainland nursed its own wounds; they would rebuild first their own roads, reestablish their own businesses and trade, erect again their monuments to give the people strength—all of this immaterial to the people who had chosen to stay on the island or who now could not leave. And yet Sano could not be bitter. He had loved the mainland, too; had felt his spirits lifted, while sifting through files on different distributors or trying to fall asleep over the whispering trees on the mountain, by remembering the crisp black of the university uniforms, the sea of students at the spring entrance ceremony; by the remembered glow of golden light and laughter pouring from the bar at night. If there was a place he’d rather have preserved or rebuilt, it was the mainland, and not this place to which he’d come.

But Sano had made this choice. He had been here fifteen years and had long ago acclimated to what the island lacked. He refused to let himself feel unprepared for what it would afford him next. Disaster or none, from the top of the mountain, when he’d emerged from his house, things had looked about the same as always. The sky was ashy as it ever was on a bad autumn day. The line of the sea still stretched flat, dark through the branches of surviving trees. The sea, source and escape, Sano’s inheritance, untouched by disaster because it was the disaster. He had decided he would follow the cart path down the mountain to meet the sea, and though he’d never before taken it by foot, the cart path too was familiar. It was the route he knew, and its difficulties he could manage.

Down the mountain, at the end of the cart path, lay his bluefin habitat, and if there was anything he would like right now, it was the sight of his fish—some, at least—still swimming, still puffing their gills in and out.

Crunching along behind him, rustling through the sedge bushes, he heard an echo of the steps he made. The child Rin, imagining herself secret, her wheeze of apprehension, her timid feet.

“Do you like fish?” he called back to Rin. And when Rin’s response was to brandish her limbs like an overturned crab and crash sideways into a scraggly bush in an attempt to hide, he was surprised to hear the new octave of his voice, of laughing.

-*-

Sano never knew Rin’s name, rightly. Ask him what he called her: “Here.” “Quit.” “Watch it,” often, when she failed to look where she put her feet. “Urchin,” sometimes, for the prickling black bush of her hair after a night’s sleep.

Rin knew her name, but being mute, could not have spoke it. She trailed after Sano, following in silence down through the brush forest and then the wet rock ravine in her old shoes. Some days she bellowed out hurt, as her skin squinched shut to wrap the ruined eye, and some days bites from insects seized her with a growling, interminable itch, all up and down her face, in her scalp, in her matted hair.

“Shh,” Sano said most of these days, and “Hush,” wrapping her with cool leaves dipped in the swollen mountain streams. And he called her a new name, “Egg,” for the pinprick scars on her eye, orange like capelin roe.

For food he trapped for them small birds, shrews, and she gathered what growing things could be eaten, as she had done before. (She still felt there had been nothing wrong with the spat-out mushroom.) Sano carried very little, but he carried a box of matches, and with them he set their fires, one each afternoon. When they finished eating, and when they’d each had one hour’s nap, Sano scattered their used-up bones, and he stomped their fire out till it looked like there had been none. He would gesture for Rin to follow, and on they’d walk for as far as one or the other of them could handle, or until it was dark.

Sano refused at night to have a fire alight, or to rest, or to close his eyes. Not that Rin could have importuned him to do so. Not that, the dark swimming upon her only eye, she could have seen.

She knew he was awake because he kept her up with low, unfinished stories. He spoke of his youth on the mainland, and of how it was to live in the house on the top of the mountain. He spoke often of his fish.

“If I were to do it again,” he said, “I think I would devote the whole of the farm to bluefin. It felt unwise at the time to invest in only one fish, and I was told as much at university: diversify, diversify. The bluefin make more money than the rest of the fish combined, but there is risk in counting on just one of anything. Father, too, would disapprove. He’d have married me to more than one wife, if he could’ve, if it meant a better chance at prosperity. This is unfair of me and unkind. He grew up scared of losing money, seeing what happened to others in his business, their land being bought up overnight. I understand he was in a bad position, and his position determined mine. Yet I made my choices within those determinations, and I did fine. For myself, and for my family.”

One night, very tired, Rin made a sound intended to shut him up, a short, high whine of displeasure. “You’re awake?” he said. And then, hurt in his voice, “I didn’t know. You did not say anything to inform me. Now I know.” And for a full day and night he didn’t speak to her.

Which after a while, Rin grew to miss. But being mute, she could say nothing to bring him back. She just had to wait.

They were heading for the shore—she realized this eventually, though Sano’s route was slow and meandering, and she knew quicker ones. They stopped a whole day in the valley at a farmhouse Sano found, dilapidated by the disaster. Rin thought they might stay there, except Sano kept saying reasons they couldn’t: “We might stay here, if it weren’t for the roof rot,” “If it weren’t for how dark it is,” “If it weren’t for the animal smells,” “If it weren’t for the fact we need kindling,” and he cracked the house’s only remaining door in two against his heel. While Sano dried and bundled the torn-down walls and floorboards, Rin made rounds from the kitchen to the back bedroom, putting her hands on things and then taking them off when Sano told her to do so.

It just seemed to her that there were many things worth picking up. Here in the farmhouse there were wood utensils and sewing needles and ropes of various lengths and beat-up knives and men’s pants and children’s shoes and piles of cheap washing rags. Not to mention those things that might bring comfort, if less useful: a set of teacups, a pen, a printed book.

There was a thick grey cloak big enough to cocoon herself in. The nights would soon get cold, and the rain might come back. This she took because she wanted it.

And it seemed that Sano wasn’t entirely opposed to this line of thought. He squatted, fingering the sleeve of a black wool coat left exposed by the storage crate he’d just torn open. “We might stay here,” he said. “If it weren’t for the wind.” He picked up the box, dumping its contents out onto the floor.

Rin went outside. In back of the farmhouse was a wire-fenced garden, the soil hilled and muddied, crops dug out in desperation by animals and maybe humans. Rin knelt on the ground and gave it a go of her own, when from the scattered leaves rose a sudden and awful stink. Rin pinched her nose shut with her finger and thumb. As she got up to flee, a chicken poked its head from behind a fence stake overgrown with weeds. It clucked forward from its hiding spot, from the rank and powerful mound it’d made, beak jutting as if proud.

This, Rin knew, was a thing too precious to not pick up.

“A chicken!” Sano cried, dropping the leather cords he was using to shoulder his piles of wood. “You found a chicken! Put it down.” He pointed to his feet.

Rin obeyed, though she felt, instinctively, that to hold onto the chicken was best.

“Look at that,” said Sano, watching the clucker puff and posture. “They must have missed her when they took their leave. Or she came here from somewhere else, like we did.” He ruffled the spotty feathers on its back. The chicken pointed its beak at him and said, Cack.

Rin bent forward and secured the chicken again in her arms, squeezing its chest to hers when its wings began to beat in protest.

“All right,” Sano laughed, “you carry her. Then we’ll go. We have what we need.” Across his shoulders he tied the sleeves of the black woolen coat, tucking the tails up over the collar to make a sort of cushion across his back.

“And, good job,” he said to her.

Rin smiled so hard she felt it in her jaw.

Sano hoisted the piles of wood, one after another, till he almost couldn’t get out of the door frame. He back to the cart path, Rin walking beside with her prize, their prize, their reward.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rin and Sano look for survivors and weather a storm.

Where the cart path divided, coming out of the valley, the remaining walk to the sea was mud. Dirty water seeped from the ground and filled their footprints, filled the ditches dug deep by footprints and cart wheels; the water filled up every gap and stayed there; it would not go down. Sano and Rin trudged onward, sidestepping stuck shoes, abandoned carts. Each mile the ruin brought by the disaster grew more upsetting, more inhospitable. They passed trees exploded into shrapnel, electric poles bent double so their cables swept the ground like a drowned person’s hair. Doors and windowscreens hung by one pin, clapping, loose, in the wind. Bodies, sometimes—blanched, hands wizened, laid out on a splintered porch, curled small near the trunk of a tree. Sano waited expectantly for signs of the living. But no one called out in supplication or greeting. No one stood watch at the windows. No one, and so Sano put a hand on Rin’s shoulders to ease her fear, and to stifle his; to keep them heading toward the coast, where perhaps all the remainders had gathered, following, like him and Rin, the obvious path.

In the afternoon, Sano was bothered to see, for the first time since the disaster, the signs in the sky of an angry rain. It was time for their fire—Rin, behind him, and the chicken, behind her, were already slowing, conditioned to making camp. “Keep up,” Sano said, instead, and pushed his pace, watching along the path for a sufficient place to take shelter, for a house with a roof and a door, finding nothing suitable.

Into the early evening they walked, through Rin’s whimpering, and one time, fitful tears; Sano had never known best how to abide complaint, and comforted himself with the thought that at the end of this, both their bodies would be by necessity stronger, that endurance was something both he and Rin could use. The sky sprinkled start-and-stop, wetting them and their wood and their hen, who burbled displeasure, whom Rin now carried because it would not walk. Sano’s skin prickled as he forced onward, as the clouds darkened and roiled and spun, and his head filled with self-loathing and dread; somehow, now, there were no houses at all; they had walked too far; he would not now turn down something broken, as long as they could huddle there for the night.

“Run,” he finally shouted, making for a cluster of cedar trees as the sky cracked open, the rain striking at their heads like arrows. “Run,” he urged, grabbing Rin by the shoulder and pushing, propelling her faster forward.

In the center of the grove, Sano stopped, swiping futilely across his sopping brow, trying to observe the situation, trying to think—was this in any way sufficient; would they be any safer or dryer here than out in the open; was there even time enough to consider something else. Too far back, Rin dragged, out of breath, her feet barely lifting, chicken borne in front like a hot and heavy cooking pot, and Sano made his decision. He stripped the woodpile from his back, cut with his knife the leather cord. Piece by piece he jammed the wood into the soft earth, and when there was enough to make two straight-enough walls, he threw the black wool coat over top for cover and burrowed underneath, holding his arms out for Rin.

Lightning streaked through the sky like a last crack in a vase, and thunder shook Sano’s bones. Rin yelped as her foot snagged on a lifted tree root, as she fell, skidding forward into the mud. The chicken, in her grasp, bellowed terror. It scratched free of her, skittering away into a tangle of bushes and out of sight.

Rin, face covered in ugly mud, raised her head to the sky and let out the wail of the bereaved. She wriggled up, feet failing to ground her, slipping backward and deeper into the mud—making more. She clawed the ground with her fingernails; she dragged herself up on her knees in the muck, and wobbled forward until her feet found earth again, and she pointed herself after the chicken; she ran—

Sano caught her and held her back.

Rin struggled against his grip, growled. He pulled harder; worried he might be hurting, but scared more of what would happen should he let her go. When he had her under the lean-to, he wrapped his arms completely round till her rage quieted, till her legs stopped reaching out for escape, and she began to sob, tears spilling from her chin to Sano’s hands where they clasped tight around her chest.

“Hush,” said Sano, tears falling also, from exhaustion, from not knowing at all what to do. He closed his eyes against them, resting his chin atop her head.

Rin’s cries grew louder, but her body calmed.

“There is something you loved,” said Sano, barely audible above the rain, “there is something you loved, and you kept care of it. You worked hard. But the thing you looked after was never yours. It was a lucky find. Its fate was decided without you. You must decide it was a happy gift that you got to take care of it at all.”

Rin listened to Sano run on like this, until the rain through the trees, the big drips on top of their lean-to, drowned him out, overcame him, put him to sleep, his arms still wrapped around her. She sunk her cheek into his shoulder and slept. This was to be the one and only time that he held her.

-*-

Sano woke her with a poke of his finger. It was morning, cloudy, but with too much sun behind for the rain to come back. Rin curled back up to sleep, but Sano poked her again. She cocked her eye up at him irritably. He put his finger to his mouth, for “Shush,” and prodded her up ahead of him, out of the lean-to. She stretched, rubbed her eyes till she saw clear. There in front of her, in a mound of picked and plucked grass, stood the chicken, clucking satisfaction to itself, presiding over a small, brown egg.

Rin snatched the egg from the makeshift nest and lifted it high, admiring. With disapproving clucks, the chicken vacated the nest as if it had been contaminated and waddled right to Rin’s ankles. Rin bent forward and trapped the creature tight once more under her arm despite its squawks, its beating wings.

“Let her go,” Sano said. “Lucky you! She’s safe, and she’s decided she’ll stay.”

Sure enough, the chicken, released, chose a spot some small distance away, where it lay down on its belly decisively and without comment.

Sano took the egg from Rin, cracked the shell against a tree trunk, and carefully poured the yolk into the bowl of Rin’s hands. It bobbed there, the warmth and shape of a small sun.

Rin drank. The taste of it was rich, full, and wholesome. Certainly she had eaten things as good as this, or better. At this moment it was the best food she’d had in memory.

Sano sipped the whites from the cup of the eggshell, and too looked satisfied. The hen pecked idly at the dirt.

“Gratitude has been difficult for me,” said Sano. “Even before the disaster—my whole life, I’ve had trouble with it. But I’m grateful for this. That you found her. And I found you.” He looked over at her, asking the silent question.

Rin could not answer, if he could not tell.

“Well,” said Sano softly. He tossed the empty shells to the ground, grinding them to bits with the toe of his sandal, covering them with earth. He brushed his hands clean on his trousers and made toward the cart path.

Rin hummed as he turned his back, pointing at the things he’d forgot. When he kept walking, when he did not answer, she stomped down the hill after him, grabbed his hand.

“What is it,” he said.

Rin pointed back at their abandoned campground, where the wood remained in poor formation, collapsing in from the weight of Sano’s soggy stolen coat.

“It’s ruined,” Sano said without looking at it, and in his eyes there was glee, as if she’d noticed something not about the wood but about him. “There’s no using wet wood. I didn’t tell you? No?”

Rin shook her head just as Sano had.

Sano squeezed Rin’s fingers together. “I should have told you what I was thinking. I’ll remember, next time.” And he turned her round to face where she’d came, giving her a light push on the back. “Go get your chicken,” he said. “You’ve been brave to leave her.”

They regained their route, the three of them, winding at last toward the shore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Read more at www.strangeclay.com if you are so inclined!

**Author's Note:**

> This story is being posted weekly at www.strangeclay.com, one new installation each Thursday. I'll cross-post here, but for new updates and other stories, you can check the website. Thanks for reading!


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